Every fall, the Yiddish Book Center welcomes a select group of recent college graduates who spend the following year working as full-time staff members, gaining valuable professional experience in Yiddish language and Jewish cultural work through the Center's Fellowship Program.
What attracts people to the Yiddish Book Center Fellowship Program? What do fellows do during their time at the Center? Read about the backgrounds of our current fellows and learn about the projects they're working on:
Dina Gorelik (digital collections) is a graduate of Brandeis University, where she studied anthropology, linguistics, and French. She began studying Yiddish at the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program and has since studied Yiddish at the Paris Yiddish Center-Medem Library, Workers Circle, and Brandeis University. Dina has previously worked with a number of different collections, including the Brandeis Library, the Montreal Jewish Public Library Archive, and the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. She is excited to work on bibliography and digital collections projects at the Yiddish Book Center. In addition to Yiddish, she is passionate about trains and public transit.
Grisha Leyfer (digital collections) graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a BA in linguistics, a BS in sustainable community development, and a minor in Latin. He has studied Yiddish with YIVO, the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, the Workers Circle, and the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, and speaks Russian fun der heym. During his time as a fellow, he has been working on cleaning up metadata in the digital collections and correcting the corpus that the Yiddish optical character recognition software trains from. Grisha is a co-creator of Yiddish Wordle and plays guitar, accordion, and lute. Aside from Yiddish, he's especially interested in cross-cultural conceptions of death and funerals, lexicography, and public transit.
Richard S. Herman Endowed Senior Fellow Caleb Sher (bibliography) holds an interdisciplinary humanities degree from the University of King's College, Halifax, as well as an MA with a certificate in Jewish studies from the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where he received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) scholarship. Following his MA, Caleb began a degree in information studies; however, he left this program to pursue work in the Yiddish realm. Beyond his interest in and (rapidly) growing collection of Yiddish books—the material anchors of Yiddish's literary and cultural history—Caleb gets excited about public humanities, open access to knowledge, and good memes (especially in Yiddish).
Giovanna (Toyve-Gitl) Truong (bibliography and translations) is a proud Wisconsinite who, despite her Bay Area leanings, has continued to travel eastward throughout her educational career. First, she studied water levitation, German, and Yiddish as a physics major at Yale University. Lately, she has been reading for the MSt in Yiddish Studies at the University of Oxford. She is the former president of one class, one klezmer band, and two juggling clubs. She founded the Repository of Yiddish in Translation, cartooned and wrote for the Yale Daily News, and letterpress printed a book on famous bow tie wearers. When Giovanna was a child, her Italian-American and Vietnamese (read: Gentile) parents fed her Hebrew National kosher all-beef hot dogs, so no one should be surprised that she found her way onto some derekh or another.
Richard S. Herman was an accomplished attorney and a lifelong lover of books, known for his kindness and generosity. He was excited about the Yiddish Book Center’s educational programs and, in 2019, he left a bequest of $1 million to endow an annual fellowship in his name.
Richard S. Herman Fellows:
Sophia Shoulson, 2019-20
Sasha Stern, 2020-21
Sarah Biskowitz, 2021-22
Charlotte Apter, 2022-23
Caleb Sher, 2023-25
Interested in becoming a Fellow?
Applications are now open for the 2025–26 fellowship program.
